Deciding to forget a traumatic experience involving violence such as the establishment of Athens might be a kind of sublimation of ones own anger at oneself. Such an act may have a cathartic aspect and as such be the last good act of a chain of evil consequences. The Historian, however, has a duty to remember that violence and be as accurate as they can be about the relevant events and their causes. The Angel of History bears witness to the accumulating faults of man with some trepidation.

http://michaelrdjames.org

Delphic Podcast

Freudian accounts of trauma and the compulsion to repeat until the trauma is "understood" and subjected to a process of catharsis are intimately connected to the themes of memory and forgetting. The Brain is obviously part of the material cause of the phenomena of remembering and forgetting but it is more the organisational structure of the brain more than particular areas that is the material substrate of even simple mental phenomena such as the perception of colours where, for example it is not distinct colours that disappear if damage occurs but rather the saturation of the entire colour spectrum.

http://michaelrdjames.org

Delphic Podcast

The work of remembering and the work of expectation are civilisation building and culture enhancing aspects of our "Being-in-the-world": the being in the world of the human psuché. The Bible, many philosophers argue including Spinoza, Kant and Wittgenstein, does contain a work of remembering but this might not be as complete as the more eschatological aspect of the work of expectation we encounter in Biblical texts, including the Gnostic Gospels.

http://michaelrdjames.org

Delphic Podcast